President Jeetu Patel plucked a young engineer from deep in the org chart and gave him unlimited AI tokens to refactor Cisco's code
Cisco just gave one of its most consequential engineering jobs to someone who, until recently, sat five rungs below the executive suite. He is 27 years old.
Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, picked the young engineer to lead a major code refactoring effort. He also handed over something most developers can only dream about: an unlimited budget for AI.
Unlimited tokens and a mandate to go big
Patel described the move to Fortune at a small roundtable dinner. He said he found the engineer “five levels” beneath him in the company hierarchy.
“I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,” Patel told Fortune. “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts.”
Tokens are the small chunks of text that AI models read and write, and companies pay for them by usage. Refactoring means restructuring existing code without changing what it does.
Cisco’s bigger AI bet
The promotion is one piece of a much larger push. Cisco is moving its engineering workforce of approximately 32,000 employees toward an AI-centric way of building software.
The targets are aggressive. Cisco aims to have six fully AI-written products by the end of 2026. By 2027, it wants 70% of its offerings to be entirely AI-generated.
The company also plans to eliminate all of its legacy code within two years.
There is at least one data point suggesting the approach can move fast. One refactor project shrank a codebase from 500,000 lines to 120,000 lines in two weeks.
Patel has framed the effort through a “founder mode” lens, treating Cisco more like a startup than a decades-old incumbent. In his view, AI handles the routine coding work. Human engineers get freed up for harder, more strategic problems.
The carrot comes with a stick. Patel has mandated adoption of AI tools, and non-compliance carries potential job risks. Cisco has also started folding token budgets into managers’ headcount budgets.
When AI spending and hiring come out of the same pot, every manager faces a direct trade-off between another engineer and more compute.
The business behind the bet
Cisco is not just consuming AI. It is selling the plumbing for it. The company’s AI infrastructure business has grown to $9.3 billion in orders over the last two years.
